ABSTRACT
This chapter explores “liking” – the affirmation of other people’s selfies using the visual, symbolic, and affective iconographies of hearts, thumbs, and emojis – as a central and structuring practice of selfie sociality. Research indicates that social media photos with faces get more likes, yet our focus groups indicated that social practices around liking selfies are deeply ambiguous. While like counts were central to how the participants decoded the legitimacy and authenticity of selfies, by the same token, they were also potentially suspect, obligatory, and/or performative. This chapter explores how likes track, make visible, and objectify the mimetic and relational flows of online desire, facilitating the “looking at looking” (specifically watching who looks at whom) that is central to selfie practices. It examines how selfies are situated in a web of responses from others, in affective flows and normative pressures and as such, how people develop a series of literacies to decode and interpret life counts.
